You’ve been cordially invited to join the visceral realists…
Hello everyone! Trevor here. As you may have heard on the podcast, we have been planning a readalong of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, and we hope you’ll join us.
The Savage Detectives was first published in 1998. In 2007, we got the first English translation, done by Natasha Wimmer. Paul and I have both read a lot of Bolaño’s work and think it’s tremendous—for both of us 2666 is a masterpiece, and we have reread it—but, despite that, neither of us has read The Savage Detectives. I’ve even had it on my shelf since, oh, 2008.
Why haven’t we read it yet? I’m sure it’s because some part of us, without even knowing this readalong was going to happen, were nevertheless holding out for this very readalong. We now get to read it with you, as fate wished. But also, for me personally, I couldn’t quite bring myself to read the final Bolaño masterpiece I figure I’ll ever read for the first time. I’m ready now, though. Not just ready—I’m aching to read it!
While you should feel comfortable to read at your own pace, we will be using a schedule to help us run discussions for the readalong. The start date is officially Saturday, February 10, with the first discussion for the first 75 pages opening up on Saturday, February 17. The schedule has us reading around 75 pages per week, with discussions starting every Saturday, until we finish the book on Saturday, April 13. The reading schedule is below, and it uses the pagination from the U.S. paperback edition published by Picador.
For the discussions, we hope to figure out how to use Substack’s threads feature. We’ve never used it before, but we hope it will work well. I will post the first thread to start general discussion for the readalong this weekend. That should be a good test run as well as a good way to start the fun.
Feel free to also discuss on the various other social media platforms. If you wish, use the hashtag #savage2024 so folks can find you.
At the end of it all, we will be recording a podcast episode, and we’d love to share some listener feedback in that episode.
We look forward to reading the book alongside any of you who wish to join!
Here are the weekly reading threads. I'll update this as they go up.
-Preliminary Thread: https://mookse.substack.com/p/the-savage-detectives-preliminary/comments
-Week 1: https://mookse.substack.com/p/week-1-the-savage-detectives-readalong/comments
-Week 2: https://mookse.substack.com/p/week-2-the-savage-detectives-readalong/comments
-Week 3: https://mookse.substack.com/p/week-3-the-savage-detectives-readalong/comments
-Week 4: https://mookse.substack.com/p/week-4-the-savage-detectives-readalong/comments
Wahoo! I figured it out and so looking forward to my second time through.